Gerald and the Death Drive

Something curious that I have seen in a recurring and distributed (i.e., by several characters, independently) way is diagnosis of things wrong with Gerald. Gerald's rather frightening mother exclames on pp 25 to Birkin "Gerald! He's the most wanting of them all. You'd never think it, to look at him now, would you?" This interior want or lack becomes as the book proceeds a description of the hollowness of Gerald, or corelessness. On pp. 72, Gerald's sense of power and domination over Pussum is described thus: "He held her in the hollow of his will, and she was soft, secret, and invisible in her stirring there." It is almost as if Pussum is something he needs to fill himself, to keep from imploding, his very will is hollow; as Birkin asks him earlier, pointedly, "wherein does life centre, for you?" [pp58], which Gerald cannot answer -- unlike Birkin, who also cannot answer, he seems unsure he will try to find a centre, like Birkin's "ultimate marriage." In addition, Gerald, despite his vigor, muscularity, and all-around manly powers, is invariably described in terms of coldness, snow, ice, wolf, and cool blue. This has the effect on me of making Gerald seem not-quite-alive.

On pp. 33, Birkin first claims "...[A] man who is murderable is a man who in a profound if hidden lust desires to be murdered," to which Gerald scoffs. Birkin continues, crucially, that "You seem to have a lurking desire to have your gizzard slit...", an identification of a powerful thanatotic urge within Gerald. I wonder how we could connect this to Ursula's (with Birkin, the two most narratively-favored characters) contention to an unconvinced Gudrun that "this playing at killing has some primitive desire for killing in it..." Ursula doesn't accept that Gerald killing his brother was an accident, saying "I couldn't pull the trigger of the emptiest gun in the world, not if someone were looking down the barrel." [pp49].